


She Was A Disaster Named Veronika

by joufancyhuh



Category: Original Work
Genre: End of the World, F/F, Kinda sorta major character death?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-04
Updated: 2018-12-04
Packaged: 2019-09-07 08:15:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16850431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/joufancyhuh/pseuds/joufancyhuh
Summary: This is how the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.





	She Was A Disaster Named Veronika

**Author's Note:**

> In the moving everything over from tumblr, this came from a deviantart contest of "how does the world end?"
> 
> This is a weird story and I love it.

Veronika was the type of woman that made me feel like I was still a child clinging to my mother’s side. She answered me in ways that would leave me with more questions than I had started with. My mother would do the same thing, a thin crease near her eyes as she forced a smile and led me back inside the safety of the house.   
  
Veronika was not my mother. I didn’t try to find someone to take the place of my mother. I wanted nothing to do with that woman, but when I met Veronika, I had no choice in how she treated me or who she reminded me of. Veronika was the type of woman who smoked a specific brand of thin cigarettes and could smother a small boy with the smoke. But I, a young woman myself, thought that her magic spells wouldn’t affect me as I had seen her do to so many others.  
  
A woman like her, I think she found some kind of comfort in my innocence. She would gaze at my eyelashes and smile her twitchy smile. She’d smooth my hair away from my face and press her soft cheek to the bridge of my nose. Her lost accent would leave me swirling in the vortex that was her words. They danced around answers and her bittersweet laughter.  
  
“Pet, some things out there aren’t meant to keep this innocence in your gray eyes.”  
  
I’d tell her my eyes are hazel and she’d laugh and say, “Exactly.”  
  
Or other times, it’d be, “These are the end days, my pet.” I’d ask her what she meant, but she’d only smile and change the subject.

  
The news is saying that China has dropped another bomb on the United States. Millions die. As they run around on the outdated fifteen inch screen in our apartment, I think I may recognize a few of them. Veronika says that’s natural. People who die are always known by someone.  
  
I asked about her home once, her Russian wasteland and her sapphire green eyes flared into an almost red and she bit the corners of her lips until they bled. I was so preoccupied with helping her get cleaned up that I forgot what had happened in the first place. I think she planned it that way.  
  
I’d like to think that her family got out before the bombs detonated and the radiation took over, that her family is safe in Africa or Venezuala or even here in Antarctica and they just don’t know her new address to write. I picture them standing on the sunny beaches in their swimsuits, laughing and dancing around in the water.  
  
I told her about it once and her face turned a pale cold and she smiled a smile that shrank my heart, that almost made me hate her, and she patted my head and said, “My littlest pet, these images in your head, I believe in them, so don’t you stop believing in them either.”  
  
The Mexican President is on our television again, saying that everything is under control, that the test-tube dinosaur is contained and will, when the problems get sorted out, be put to use in the war. This dinosaur, he’s saying that it’s going to be bullet proof. He was going to add something, but Veronika jumped up and turned it off, a solemn look on her face. I wonder if she thinks that this is a bad idea, too.  
  
Veronika said she remembers when things were much simpler. I responded with how she sounded like the old people, protesting that nature isn’t meant to be controlled, that science is wrong and religion, people need to go back to religion. I asked her if she believed in their god. She said yes.  
  
“They proved them wrong though, those religion fanatics. Why would you want to believe in incorrect data?”  
  
She looked up from painting her toenails, and cocked her head to the side. “Because I need to know that there’s more than just this.”  
  
“I like this, our apartment, our lives together.”  
  
“The world, my pet. Think larger.” She laughed a little. “This is why I love you, my pet. This is why.” Her pink glossed lips stick to mine and I can almost taste salt in her mouth.  
  
I try to imagine how it used to be. My mother, too, told me stories, sad stories of people dying by driving machines. She insisted that my father died that way, too. The scientists that visited the house always said something different though. The word “traitor” was tossed around a lot.  
  
The news is saying that Japan has just been completely covered by a giant tsunami. The news crews aren’t stopping to help. Veronika says that there’s no hope for any of us, that nature will kill us all. I open my mouth to protest, but the sound of lightning drowned me out of a reply. Sounds like tonight’s storm has arrived early.  
  
“Do you think the world will end when Pluto finally hits us, or do you think it’ll be before then?”  
  
She looked at me, and I could see a glimpse of radiation poisoning in her pupils, turning her eyes into an opal color. “I think the world is ending day by day.” She tucked me into bed that night and laid with me until I fell asleep.  
  
The next day, the uniforms came and took her away. I was put under watch with no explanation. Then, just as sudden as it came, it disappeared. I never saw her again, and anything remotely related to her was taken away in plastic bags by the uniforms.  
  
I like to think that she’s out there, safe, on the beaches with her family; that the uniforms just let her go, that it was all just a big misunderstanding. She standing out in the sand, her midnight hair shining and her lip-twitch smile plastered onto her face as she smokes her long-sticked cigarette and presses her head against the glass of an ice cream shop, smoke rolling out of her mouth that would smother a young boy, but not me, no, not me.  
  
“This just in: Antarctica, our once tropical paradise, has frozen over once more. Anything or anyone left in this quick freeze is considered lost.”


End file.
